The Grace of Giving Up

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 18th Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

In the Book of Numbers today we meet Moses at the end of his rope. He is exhausted and heavy-laden. He’s been leading his people on this wild goose chase through the wilderness, doing his best to care for them even when they are sulky and petulant, which is often. Currently they are recalling with mouthwatering nostalgia the fabulous Mediterranean buffet overflowing with fish cucumbers and melons, leeks, onions, garlic they seem to remember eating as slaves in Egypt, and they are weeping because they have no meat. Moses of course has no meat either—they are in the middle of the desert—so where is he to get meat for all these people? It’s impossible, and he is weighed down, staggering under the burden of his responsibility. So Moses takes it to the Lord and pours out his displeasure. “Why have you treated me so badly?” he prays. “I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once.” The words of Moses’ mouth and the meditations of his heart are filled with anger and frustration, hopelessness and exhaustion.

And apparently this forthright and honest expression is acceptable in the Lord’s sight, because God responds as if just waiting for Moses to ask. Finally, he asks for help! Moses has at last reached the end of what he can do by himself. His strength is dried up, and this crisis frees him, frees him to be dependent on God and trust in the Lord’s strength. “When I am weak, then I am strong,” St. Paul says. So God, who “is always more ready to hear than we to pray,” has Moses gather up seventy of the people known to be wise and God pours his Spirit out on them, too. Spread among this many people, the weight is eased, and the burden is light.

Giving up like this can be a moment of grace. Reaching the end of your rope can be a moment of grace. Our efforts and strivings are defeated, revealed to be bankrupt, exhausting us, depressing us—and in the world of the gospel, where the last are first, and the poor in spirit are called blessed, this is good news. When our self-improvement projects fail, rather than double down, try harder, castigate ourselves further, really put our backs into it this time—we can take the opportunity that failure offers, that weariness ushers in, to open to the gift of God’s grace-filled universe, where all things, all creation, each of us depend on God for each breath. That we continue to exist moment by moment is evidence of God’s sustaining power. God is holding us in being even right now, breathing through us, praying in us. “You are in me deeper than I am in me,” St. Augustine prayed, finally at rest. 

Anything we do is done by God’s grace working through us, not our own efforts, as painstaking as they are. We can do nothing by ourselves. This is the way things work, and there is rest that comes when we allow our illusions of control to fall, when we stop pushing against the grain of God’s universe and align ourselves with the reality that we are little, lowly, and dependent. The lilies of the field do not toil and are clothed in beauty. God feeds the sparrows. A little child leans on Jesus’s breast. And when we stop trying to carry the world on our shoulders, surprise surprise, we find ourselves a little less exhausted: “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul.” I suspect that even more than by his 70 new colleagues, Moses is revived by giving up, by surrendering to God’s grace that holds the world up. “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul.”

I find today’s portion of Psalm 19 praising the law of the Lord so beautifully  striking. There is a message of freedom and ease here, though at times the legal language can be a challenge to hearing this. Talk of obedience to the law and pursuit of perfection—some of us have whole complexes about these things, you know. It can send us spinning back into the bootstrapping framework where if you dream it you can achieve it, where productivity is the measure of a human being, where the law is a standard we meet well or badly, righteousness just another product, and virtue a trophy. It’s all commodified, and it all depends on us. It’s up to us to earn it, stand on our own two feet, and finally prove ourselves. 

This is our collective delusion much of the time. But the deepest reality is just the opposite. We never have to prove ourselves with God. It only makes us sick to try. God knows our hearts, exactly as they are. “To you all hearts are open and from you no secrets are hid.” And God is already at work in us. The law of the Lord is given as a gift and is working on us even as we are unaware of it, cleansing us of secret faults, making us whole and sound. The word of the Lord can’t be chained by the shackles we impose but shows up outside the lines, not just in the tent of meeting but out in the camp too, and the voice of prophecy calls from the unruly wilderness. Healing comes through strangers and fellow disciples alike. The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the holy Spirit that has been given to us. It is all given: we never have to prove ourselves with God. 

So whether we are suffering or cheerful or laid low, we can bring it before God in prayer. Like Moses, really let it rip! Offered up just as they are, the words of our mouth and the meditations of our hearts are always acceptable before God. The Lord is our strength and our redeemer; the Lord is our righteousness. Giving up on fixing ourselves and surrendering to unconditionally loving acceptance, we can trust God to refine our lives. Whatever in us needs to be purified—and there’s plenty—God will do it. “Everyone will be salted with fire.” Salt is a preservative, remember. This image of God’s refining, seasoning fire is not a threat of destruction. What happens to precious metal in a flame? Corruption is burned off, and the material becomes more purely itself. Its true essence is clarified and comes into sharper focus: much fine gold. Having given up our grasping effort, the things we tried and struggled and failed to change about ourselves start to emerge, naturally flourishing under the sunshine of God’s total acceptance, shining on the just and the unjust in each of us.

I want to share a reflection from a friend of mine on Psalm 19. Hear how she heard this psalm as a child:

“I am in a clearing,” she writes, “under a pair of sycamore trees. I’m maybe nine or ten years old. Around the base of the trees are little wooden benches, and sixty or so girls, some younger than me, some older, are sitting on them, some of us in little foldable Crazy Creek chairs. A woman with soft yellow hair and a white sweater sits in front of us. She looks exactly like an angel to me. As all our chattering dies down, she says in a gentle voice: Hello, sweet ladies. Are we ready? Let’s start the day like we always do. Let’s take a deep breath, slow down, and listen. And we would gradually stop squirming. Everything would be still for a couple of seconds. A twig would break. And the world swelled around us. 

“After a couple of minutes, the woman, [whose name was] Nancy, would ask, what did you hear? And every morning, we’d report back the same things. The leaves rustling. The crickets. Birds. The creek. The Crazy Creek chairs creaking. Every morning, we rested for a moment, and the world came into existence, and we came into existence with it. 

“I attended this same summer camp from age 8–16,” she goes on, “three weeks every summer, and every morning would begin under these trees. Every day, we’d finish Devotions time with our camp verse: Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in Thy sight, oh Lord my strength and my Redeemer. At least once every year, Nancy would read the whole of Psalm 19. The heavens declare the glory of God. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple, the precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart, and my favorite, the commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The sun, like a champion! Under those trees, I didn’t need to know what was meant by “law” or “statues” or “commands.” They sounded just like themselves: trustworthiness was the statute, radiance was the command, truth the only judgment. This was, for me, the first experience of what I might call “belief”—it was a sense of something precious, a sweet taste, that somehow transfused us, in which I and all of us somehow became inordinately precious, and sweet. “The words of our mouths” could be honeycomb, light, even a simple kind of wisdom.”

As a child listening to the sycamore trees, my friend intuitively understood the logic of grace: love has been poured out on us, is being poured out on us, and we respond in gratitude. Belief, as she says, isn’t having the right thoughts in your head; it’s learning this sort of whole-bodied surrender and trust. Jesus’s yoke is easy and his burden is light.

So, when you’re next at the end of your rope, what would happen if you let it go? Cut it off? Let the attempt to do it yourself drop away, and brought everything uncensored to God, trusting and dependent? 

You might just find that God’s perfect law revives your soul. God is already at work, reviving us, salting us, preserving us, restoring us, and then sprinkling us out as seasoning for the whole world to draw out the unique savor of all created things.

Let the words of our mouths and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.